And yet that’s what happened, at least according to Oracle’ s press release. Salesforce.com has run on Oracle database and middleware (and perhaps on Oracle Linux, not sure on that) for a long time. But it also ran on commodity hardware. In fact, Benioff was really, really publicly decrying what he mockingly called Oracle’s “cloud in a box” a few years back.

According to Oracle’s statement: (note that it is from Oracle and not Salesforce, and the emphasis is mine):